


Without you I keep heavy house.

by prettylittlegoat



Category: London Spy
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Memories, this might be a little sad my apologies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-04
Updated: 2016-02-04
Packaged: 2018-05-18 04:09:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5897671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettylittlegoat/pseuds/prettylittlegoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>sometimes, danny gets lost in what he remembers. it's much simpler that way, because he remembers so much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Without you I keep heavy house.

**Author's Note:**

> i really have been meaning to work on that 00q fic, but alex/danny keeps writing itself. they had such an easy relationship to write about, even if it makes me sad. pardon any strangeness - this is unbeta'd.  
> the title is from pygmalion to galatea by robert graves.  
> as always, comments/kudos are dearly appreciated! my tumblr is over at cabritabonita.

“I was fifteen,” you say, “the first time I broke someone’s nose. In the club, he - a man, of course, an older type - he tried to slip something in my drink, but I saw. I was fifteen, and I’d gotten a friend’s ID to get in at all, and I think I was more than a bit drunk. More than drunk, even. I got thrown out, and they said that I better not come back again on account of my age. Nothing about the fight, though.”

He shifts closer to you. His skin is banded with golden light, and you see little shifting motes of dust in it. You feel guilty, for a second, that he’s so perfect-carved and so like a statue and in your humblr little bed. He leans forward, tender, and kisses the worry off your face.

“Did you feel guilty?” he says, in that gentle way of his. You never had before, but he’s so soft with his words that you feel, perhaps, a little guilty.

“No,” and you’re a little proud of it.

He smiles softly. “Like a child; angry and innocent.”

You don’t respond, but you do lean forward and kiss him again, because you don’t want to think about what those words mean. You consider it, for a second, and conclude that he’s probably right, but you’ve spent so long building yourself up with bad little friends that you don’t want to consider your own youngness.

He seems so old when he smiles like that. You come to miss it.

-

“Do you like sushi?”

The day is cold, and it is raining, but you’re sitting together in a little coffee house and are as warm as you need to be. His hand is on the table, and one of yours traces his forearm. You consider the question, because you feel like you need to with how careful-long he takes on each of yours.

“I don’t know,” you settle on. “I’ve never had it that I can remember.” You wish that the consideration made you sound smarter, more sure of yourself, but all you can think of is a little kid in too-short trousers and a sweater to his knees. You smile brightly and try to ignore the thought.

He nods, and doesn’t say anything for a time. “Do you have dinner plans?”

You never do. Still, you never do.

-

When you were younger, you had a book of Greek myths, very nicely illustrated in coppers and blues. Your favorite was about Narcissus, because you dreamed of falling in love with yourself. You didn’t realize that was something most people didn’t need to dream of; you just thought it’d be nice to have someone who loved you back.

You’re laying on his bed, draped over him. Your chin rests on your hand which rests on his chest, and he’s smiling down at you, a little soft-stricken. You love when you can see just how in love with you he is, because it makes you feel a little better about how you feel like Zeus: head pounding with something unknowable, but that you’re sure is important.

“Did anyone ever read you stories when you were a child?” he asked, brushing a hand through your hair. He’s always preoccupied with those tangles, and plays with them, you think, without realizing.

“Of course,” and you tell him about the book. When he asks what your favorite myth was, you say Pygmalion: the sculptor. He smiles a small little smile at you, and then the two of you kiss for longer or shorter than you care to remember. You think that he knows you were going to say something different, but also you think that he believes you.

When you wake up the next morning, he brushes your hair out of your face. “You were whispering in your sleep,” he says, “about me.”

“About Galatea, then,” you say, and he grins. He kisses you, and it’s soft, and you think that maybe he understands. You feel terribly clever, and smitten with it. ‘Sometimes, when you’re particularly lonely, you reread Pygmalion’s story. You try to see where Aphrodite could have taken Galatea from him, and why.

-

His closet is very nicely organized, and you’re always jealous of it. T-shirts, then sweaters, then button-ups, then jackets, then coats. His trousers are all folded over hangers, and all lie perfect and square with one another. The shoes are neatly tucked beneath it all.

Once, he asks you to order his wardrobe. “Why?” you say, laughing. You’re sure your face is quite pink, because you’ve just made him finish and you feel giddy with it, but you know he likes how bright you get. “My closet’s a right disaster; I couldn’t possibly help yours any.”

“You think differently than I do,” he says, smiling, “and I think I might like a closet that reminds me of you.”

The next time you visit, you bring over your brightest, ugliest jumper. It’s mustard yellow and decorated with purple and green roses on the shoulders and little green dots over the rest. It goes right in the center - between two suitjackets - on a green wire hanger, and he looks the happiest you’ve ever seen him. He kisses you like he’s drowning. When you look back on that moment, you think maybe he felt more like he was falling than drowning.

Slowly, his closet gains more jumpers. A pair of your trainers sits in loose-laced disarray next to a pair of his, clean and new-white, but he never straightens them. A red and blue paisley tie gets draped over one of the handles, and you notice that he never opens that door of the wardrobe anymore.

“Why don’t you ever move the things I’ve put in there?” you ask one day. He’s slipping his golden arms into a white shirt, and you wish you could stop him.

“They’re yours.” He sounds surprised.

You help him put on the mustard yellow jumper after you tell him that anything yours is his, and he looks like someone’s slapped him. It’s not, curiously, an upset or bad look, so you don’t say anything. You think that him wearing that around his flat, playing with the cuff, is the closest to a public display of affection you’ll ever get, but it feels much more intimate than a kiss in the street.

It hangs in the center of your closet. There is dust on its roses.

-

He calls you on a lie, but only once. You’d lied to him other times, and the guilt ate you up.

Six months, when you’re talking in a warehouse with people you don’t know from Adam, you feel like vomiting when the memory resurfaces. “He knew,” you whisper to yourself, turning from your little group of allies. “He knew, he knew.”

They say nothing about it.


End file.
